WPI staffer's pixels help nab crooks  even Whitey

5The scene: At WPI, forensic video skills to help area police put the glare on suspects and fugitives.

5The budgets: The service that Mr. Fiene has provided is one that most single law enforcement agencies could not afford,.

5The expert: At WPI, Mr. Fiene installs, maintains and comes up with new ways to do video systems for teaching and learning.

5The students: Mr. Fiene said he has given video forensic talks about that case, and at least two WPI students conducted major projects, coming up with their own suppositions of what the different cars would have been.

WORCESTER — For about a dozen years, a Worcester Polytechnic Institute staff member has volunteered his forensic video skills to help area police put the glare on suspects and fugitives.

Bruce M. Fiene took a grainy photo of Whitey Bulger and helped turn it into the iconic image that stirred up the case in 2006.

He'd been a volunteer with the state police's violent fugitive apprehension unit, which was in charge of the 10 most wanted accused criminals.

At the time, there hadn't been movement in the Bulger case.

In an interview in his office, which has patches from the nearly three dozen area police departments he's helped, Mr. Fiene said he did not know how the state police got the latest photographs of Mr. Bulger and his longtime girlfriend Catherine Greig.

"They wanted the news wires to light up and get it going again," Mr. Fiene said of the 2006 effort. "They felt that these pictures were more representative at the time of what they'd look like."

A television reporter who had the exclusive on the story drove from state police headquarters in Framingham to give the original hard copies of the photos to Mr. Fiene at WPI, which had powerful computers with the latest Adobe Photoshop and other equipment.

The process of retaking, enhancing, scanning and printing the images took about three hours, said Mr. Fiene, a 48-year-old city resident.

"The fact that it looks that good blown up on a computer screen, I'm amazed," Mr. Fiene said. "It usually doesn't work that way. It's usually garbage in, garbage out."

Because Mr. Bulger had been gone for so long and the case was stagnant, Mr. Fiene said his efforts with the photos didn't mean anything to him at the time.

"Every other day or once a week or once a month, we were doing cases that were fresh murders and everything," Mr. Fiene said. "We were catching them. I would see my handiwork on TV all the time."

After years on the run, Bulger was arrested in 2011 and convicted earlier this month. Mr. Fiene called it "exciting to see that come to fruition."

Mr. Fiene is often the guy police departments call for media needs.

Sutton Police Chief Dennis J. Towle said Mr. Fiene is the first person his department calls if it gets a piece of video or surveillance evidence that is unclear, grainy or reduced.

Chief Towle said most of the video his department receives from crimes at convenience stores or banks are privately owned, and often personnel at those businesses don't know the inner workings of the system.

"Bruce either has a program or knowledge of what needs to be done," the chief said, noting Mr. Fiene's work in helping Sutton police with an armed robbery case, and more recently, the alleged theft of construction equipment off Route 146.

Leicester Police Chief James J. Hurley called Mr. Fiene a pioneer in the field in this part of the state.

For the past 15 years, while a police officer in both Shrewsbury and now in Leicester, Chief Hurley said, he has worked with Mr. Fiene on a number of video projects.

"He is really committed to the process and has worked closely with the Worcester County Breaking and Entering Task Force over the years and makes himself readily available for any pressing or serious case," Chief Huley said.

If the task force did not have Bruce early on it would have to travel about an hour to drop off the tape at another resource and then pick it up several days or weeks later, depending on the backlog, the chief said.

The service that Mr. Fiene has provided is one that most single law enforcement agencies could not afford, Chief Hurley said.

In 2006, Mr. Fiene worked a Holden case involving a series of people using stolen credit cards in the area.

A detective in Holden dug into the case and began getting images of people using credit cards.

"I went through all the video tape and started amassing a pretty good group of pictures," Mr. Fiene said. "When we finally broke the case, it turned out to be an Asian gang out of New York that was running the whole show."

Mr. Fiene also worked a 2003 Worcester case involving a woman who'd been killed in a hit-and run accident.

With only blurry black-and-white video footage of a car, Mr. Fiene worked on the case for a month, to no avail."That was a case where the actual president of the university at that time said it was okay for me to work as much as I wanted on the case," he said.

He and a police officer from Worcester traffic division reviewed evidence for at least two hours a day.

Mr. Fiene said he brought in other scientists on campus, including one who'd been in charge of counting scud missiles in the desert with satellite imagery.

With knowledge of the suspect's car's wheelbase, and the scientist's computers, they shut down Route 20 for an hour in the area the accident occurred, and took new images during the daylight of cars going in and out.

The effort helped them narrow the list of types of cars that may have been involved in the hit-and-run to four or five, he said. "We came very close to getting a judge to agree to look at the owners of certain types of cars, but the judge said it was more of a fishing expedition," he said.

The case is still unsolved and the officer with whom Mr. Fiene worked retired.

Mr. Fiene said he has given video forensic talks about that case, and at least two WPI students conducted major projects, coming up with their own suppositions of what the different cars would have been.

Mr. Fiene, who recalled one day having five detectives waiting in line at his office, says he hasn't been needed for more basic things since about 2005 to 2006, when the Department of Homeland Security began giving grants to various police departments for equipment, facilitating the switch from analog to digital images.

"From that point on I saw Worcester in here once in a blue moon because they had their own guy and knew what they were doing," he said. "So I would only get the hard cases,"Mr. Fiene said. "That's what I get now."

At WPI, Mr. Fiene installs, maintains and comes up with new ways to do video systems for teaching and learning.

In addition, the environmentally conscious Mr. Fiene and his wife, Tracy Wheeler, fuel their vehicles with vegetable oil from WPI's cafeteria.

Mr. Fiene once used his media skills on area ghost hunts from about 2008 to 2010.

He said he doesn't believe in ghosts. But after reading a Telegram & Gazette story about people who were involved in ghost hunts, Mr. Fiene said he felt the people were "out there, and weren't taking things scientifically."

He said he looked up the ghost hunter and asked to accompany the group as an observer, his camera in tow.

He later told the group he could offer them good equipment and a healthy skepticism.

"In one case I was able to get the fire protection engineering department to loan me their infrared video cameras. I set those up. It was a lot of fun," he said, adding he never saw or heard anything. "There were never any ghosts."

One ghost hunt, at the S.K. Pierce Mansion in Gardner, was featured on the BBC show "Dead and Famous," but Mr. Fiene, who was interviewed, said he never saw the finished product.